The impolite music and dance of cacophony, dissonance, and disorder vibrate with a fugitive, turbulent Otherness, hinting at the specters of alternate social, spiritual, and aesthetic orders. Yet in these paradigmatic dyads one term always implies-indeed, defines-the other in these relations there is never erasure, but rather evidence of white culture’s perverse fascination-envy, even-with the sonorous, dislocated, inciting, and infinitely suggestive products of black culture. Purity and pollution, harmony and dissonance, over and under, order and disorder, Christian epiphany and damning confusion have limned the edge distinguishing freedom and personhood from enslavement and abjection. Stealing across the borders delineating her social and class identity, Amaya created a fiery and volcanic style which was Gypsy in its very edge of violence and which shaped the bedrock of the international public’s notions of flamenco dance to this day.įrom pre-modern Christmas pageants all the way through to Jordan Peele’s “sunken place”-a place where, as Simone de Beauvoir has written, the subjectivity of “sovereign and unique” beings “is crushed by the dark weight of other things,” Whiteness and Blackness have been conjoined in a series of negative correlations. Masked by the transgressive Gypsy reputation, Amaya enacted exotic and frightening edges of behavior beyond the pale of the aesthetic norms of her day. Amaya followed in the venerable Gypsy tradition of fulfilling her audience’s stereotypic expectations. Stemming from the seductive yet threatening fortune-teller’s gaze, Amaya’s hotly radical innovations demonstrate continuity with long-standing traditions of Gypsy performance. ![]() Amaya’s movement and presentation carry the heat of border trespasses between male and female, between Spanish concert dance and her home-grown Gypsy style. The forms of the Gypsy mask, manifestation of the relationship between performance by Spanish Gypsies and performance of them by others, ground a detailed analysis of Amaya’s dance. These two historical lines define each other by their very opposition, although their expressive forms often blend. Amaya’s biography is therefore set into a background tracing in parallel the history of Gypsy performance in Spain and the development of their stereotypic image and representation. Flamenco was born from the performance of Spanish Gypsies, yet Amaya was the first Gypsy to gain fame on the international concert stage. It asks why Amaya was an important artist: what was innovative and seminal in her dance? It also asks why Amaya was such a popular artist: what deep nerve did she strike in European and American sensibilities? These questions are approached by examining Amaya’s historical context. This dissertation documents, through primary research, Amaya’s life and dance. Dressed in male costume, she rose to international stardom in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, raising flamenco to a new level of stature and visibility. ![]() ![]() Bom in poverty, trained on the streets and on the cart which was the family’s home, Amaya created a style blending the expression and seduction of the feminine dance with the aggressivity, speed, and risk of the masculine. Carmen Amaya was one of the most important and influential dancers in Flamenco history.
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